Media discourses

Litoselliti argues that texts have meanings, and these meanings can be carried out in different media forms such as text, image, sound and gesture. The meaning behind media discourses is very well curated and delivered to the audience in order to push a certain agenda or imprint certain ideologies; Media discourses benefit the system that is in power by pushing and constructing ideologies through the inclusion, exclusion, emphasis and erasure of ideas and identities.

In Chan-Malik’s text, she analyses discourses that were used in US media reporting the 1979 Iranian women’s protests and how it paints westernized ideologies as modern and civilized, and Muslim customs as hysteric and uncivilized. For example, they were reporting white-passing women, unveiled and dressed in western clothing, that were resisting Khomeini’s government, as fighting for freedom and women’s right and liberation from Muslim anti-feminist regime. However, they described the chador-wearing women, that resisted the Chah’s ruling, as the “hysteria of the revolution” and stated they were inferior to men. Chan-Malik also points out how this American discourse of the veil utilized very similar orientalist lexicons as did Lord Cromer and his associates in British colonizations.

And so these discourses carry within them notions of racism, which intersects with white supremacy , but also orientalism, thus the term used to describe the American discourses during the Iranian women movements in 1979 was “racial orientalist discourses”

Stabile and Kumar discuss orientalism and imperialist feminism similar to Shan-Malik. The difference, however, is the discourses surrounding the protection scenario: Discourses painted about Afghani women as in need of protection from Taliban, which was supported by US policies, that deprived them from education, jobs and forced burqas on them, which only pushed the the US imperialist agenda further. The US painted this pictures to justify their war on Afghanistan in order to “save” Afghani women from Taliban. In addition, media discourses diverged the conversation from what these women really suffered from like starvation and displacements and emphasized burka as a form of oppression instead, which isn’t the case. It is also important to point out how Afghani women were invisible in the media but started to appear in US media after 9/11, as the US started to lead war in Afghanistan. After the downfall of Taliban, US media showed women taking off their veil, finally being free, going back to their jobs. The US wanted to paint itself as their savior from Taliban, justifying the war, when in reality little had changed in Afghani women’s live after the collapse of Taliban.

Hayek discusses the self-orientalist discourses misrepresenting Syrian women that could not amplify their own voices and demands due to economic and educational disadvantages they suffered from. Self-orientalism means when non western people use westernized hegemonic discourses in their representation of eastern cultures, Muslim and Syrian cultures in this case. For example, Syrians activists, RNC, were fighting against the marriage of Syrian women in exchange for money. They were trying to get international intellectual elites and corporate professionals to fund their campaign and to support marriage only between Syrian men and women. When in reality Syrian women living in the camp weren’t necessarily suffering from this problem, as much as from housing problems and food insufficiency. Instead of amplifying the voices of these women and their demands, they were painting these women as in need of protection.

Chan-Malik, S. (2011). Chadors, Feminists, Terror: The Racial Politics of U.S. Media Representations of the 1979 Iranian Women’s Movement.

Stabile, C. A., & Kumar, D. (2005). Unveiling imperialism: Media, gender and the war on Afghanistan.

Alhayek, K. (2014). Double Marginalization: The Invisibility of Syrian Refugee Women’s Perspectives in Mainstream Online Activism and Global Media.

Litosseliti, L. (2013). “Putting gender and language on the map” (read pp. 13–15; 22–24) and “Gender and language in the media”